Yes, I think marriage should begin with a fresh slate – meaning both partners should be comfortable and confident enough to hear the truth about the past, make their peace with it and know that a commitment is being made after all of this. The best time should be while in the relationship itself when that place of trust has been reached – without trust and openess, acceptance, what’s the point of starting a marriage in the first place?

No: I don’t think your past and how many relations you have had makes a difference apart from if you have a concern about sexual health, but STD’s can happen if you only had one partner. I have been in a relationship for 21 years (a bad one at the moment but still…) and I don’t know how many sexual partners he had before me. I wouldn’t care.
If someone asked me I would tell them, but they don’t, in my opinion have a right to ask.
I imagine people who ask about numbers, are the ones who have issues and insecurities and therefore shouldn’t ask because it will only feed that. Not a relationship expert by any means but I think the past is the past and it shouldn’t matter. I would be more interested in if the person demonstrated they could be faithful while in a relationship with how many partners they had.

I don’t get it. So you’re going to find out your current girlfriend had slept with 10 other men before meeting you. And then what? What is that going to change? If this somehow bothers you than it’s probably time to see a counselor. When I enter a relationship I do so with the person I know I can trust wholeheartedly. I trust that she will share with me things that she finds important for me to know. Just as I would with her. Everything else is noise.

Ninjali: for me the STD and the prostitute issue wouldn’t matter. They have come clean with you and told you their past, regardless of the number. If you love that person and want a relationship with them, the numbers don’t count. Honesty and Trust do,.

Hi again.

Should spouses be as up-front as possible as early on as possible, reach an agreement with what to/and what not share, deal with it, and then move on? I think boundaries should be set early on, if it is important for you to have an exact number of sexual partners your spouse has had, I would say you broach that early in the relationship. If your partner does not want to share, the individual should decide if that is important to them going forward to know the exact number. To be honest i imagine there are many men and women out there that simply don’t know the exact number they slept with.

If your spouse witheld information that later comes forward, there might have been a fear of sharing that information because they worry about how the other person would react. I don’t think it is deceptive necessarily, but you would need to understand why at that time the person wasn’t honest about it.

Ninjali: I read your other thread and I understand where you are coming from. However how about thinking about how after having many sexual partners, she chose and stayed with you,even though she was your first sexual partner. So you must give her something all those other men did not. Sounds to me all those years she was looking for love and affection in the form of sexual activity and finally she found and stayed with you. I have a family member who was very very sexually active in her youth, I don;t think she could tell you how many partners she had. It was all for attention. Now she is grown up and married she is ashamed of her past, but she has settled now and is very happy. Her husband gives her all the love she needs.